Are there any performance benefits to non-skinned characters?

Non-skinned as in made of multiple smaller meshes representing body parts, that is. Forearms, arms, hands, etc. You can see this in Wave Race 64 as well as Super Mario 64, and SEGA seemed to at least partially rely on it as late as Virtua Fighter 3 and Crazy Taxi.

I'm assuming a basic mesh renderer makes for less overhead than a skinned one, but pretty much the entire planet and their dog uses skinning since the early 2000s, giving UT no incentive to optimise any other technique. The base question is:

How much better optimised is skinning?

and the actual question that stumps me is

How does one single skinned mesh renderer + filter compare to potentially as many mesh renderers + filters as there are body parts, times up to -- say -- a hundred characters onscreen at any one time?

Additionally, if non-skinned wins:

Is it even worth the potential extra geometry between joints?

If it helps any, I'm not down to individual fingers or any facial animation.